Lisa M. Wilson in Romanticism On the Net 8 (November 1997)
With the revelation that the anonymous author of The Monk was none other than Matthew Gregory Lewis, Esq., newly-elected M.P., came a storm of criticism that cemented an identification in the public imagination between the author and his scandalous text and characters. (1) The public’s fascination with the “perversions” of the novel’s main characters (including the “lascivious” Ambrosio and the demon-transvestite Matilda) led to readings of Lewis’s character as author and man through the lens of the characters in his novel, a move which was epitomized in Lewis’s nickname: “the Monk”.
The overwhelming popularity of The Monk also led to personal celebrity for Matthew Gregory Lewis, with its accompanying attempts to locate the truth about the novel’s author in the relationship between his body and his text. However, just as efforts to condemn the novel and its author never achieved complete success, neither did the outcry surrounding the novel result in utter condemnation of its author and his talents. Instead, Lewis seems to have achieved the impossible by transforming what might have proved to be a disastrous success de scandale into a substantial reputation as one of the most successful literary lions of his day.
As Lewis was aware, writing in the debased genre of the Gothic novel was an unlikely route to literary laurels, since the genre was commonly constructed as the province of hack writers, especially women. As a man who rose to fame as a Gothic novelist, a form conventionally thought of as “light,” and therefore “well adapted to female ingenuity,” Lewis’s masculinity as well as his literary authority would already have been called into question by his choice of genre. Critics in this period often refer with some anxiety to the gender confusion which could result when men wrote in such “feminine” genres, casting the literary act as a kind of transvestism. For example, one critic, reviewing yet another novel authored by “A Lady,” cautioned men against the temptation “to shelter themselves under petticoats” by choosing a female pseudonym in order to exploit some manly reviewer’s chivalrous impulses. He warns: “such an author would not find it easy to undress himself, and, in his own person, claim the bays bestowed upon the Lady.” (2) Such gender stereotyping clearly complicated Lewis’s relationship to the literary and critical establishment, by making it easier to cast him as effeminate and call into question his literary authority.
In the aftermath of The Monk’s success, moralists were horrified by the proliferation of anonymous cheap editions of the novel, as well as the increase in mostly-anonymous female writers who adopted Lewis’s popular style. (3) With no author whom they might attack on moral or legal grounds, outraged critics they inevitably fell back on castigating Lewis for these productions as well. As the author of Prodigious!!! or, Childe Paddie in London claims after reciting a long list of complaints against the morality of The Monk and its author: “Another evil is example; forth step hundreds of novelists, who ape the perverted genius of the author of the Monk . . . forth have rushed from the press of late days swarms of these things, and many from female pens too, which will as scientifically excite the passions, as any chemical preparation which may be made up.” (4) The language of invading plague this satirist employs reveals his sense that Lewis has let loose an uncontrollable horde of anonymous female hack writers who threaten society with their dangerously drug-like novels. Unlike Lewis, whom the author represents as possessing a certain “genius,” even if it is of a perverted kind, these novelizing hordes merely “ape” Lewis’s example, manufacturing passionately potent texts simply by following Lewis’s formula. This satirist reacts to the threat posed by the novelizing hordes by dismissing them as mere cardboard cut-outs, reproductions made in the image of the author of The Monk, an anonymous swarm who might be exterminated by eliminating the “example” they blindly follow. His choice of metaphors both heightens the impression that these hordes are dangerous and attempts to belie those fears. While his swarm imagery implicitly connects the faceless troop of authors with other kinds of anonymous social threats like Jacobins or groups of working-class radicals, these novel-writing swarms are both more and less dangerous in being mindless and led by an identifiable party—Lewis. By repeating fears about the lack of social control over anonymous authors, but linking that danger to a figure of Romantic authorship like Lewis, this author attempts to defuse the threat of anonymous publication by attributing it to a single individual. In doing so, critics attempted to control the contagious debasement of public taste that the popularity of Lewis’s style represented. Ironically, such reasoning had unintendedly positive effects for Lewis’s literary reputation. This application of the ideology of Romantic authorship forced critics to conclude that Lewis and The Monk had raised themselves above the level of such feminine hackwork. By insisting on Lewis’s responsibility for his disreputable literary followers, his critics were forced to conclude that Lewis’s success was the result of a unique combination of scandalous text and outrageous personality—and genius.
From the outset of his professional career, Lewis revealed his uneasiness about his literary authority and critical reception in ways which emphasize his awareness of these conventional links between gender and genre. In The Monk’s opening “Advertisement,” Lewis reveals his burdensome sense of literary indebtedness by listing numerous sources for the novel, ending with an admission of “plagiarism”: “I have now made a full avowal of all the plagiarisms of which I am aware myself—, but I doubt not, many more may be found, of which I am at present totally unconscious”. (5) By doing so, Lewis may have thought to distance himself from the figure of the anonymous hack who appropriates the originality of others without attribution. Ironically, this move appears to have had the opposite effect. At least two of his reviewers took this admission seriously, commenting on the effectiveness of Lewis’s use of his sources in order to discuss his merit as a writer. The 1796 Analytical review opens, “In the preface to this romance, which displays no common powers, the author points out the interesting tale which he has chosen to amplify and alter,” and goes on to argue that Lewis has constructed a “more finished picture of this bold sketch.” While this reviewer asserts that the author displays “no common powers,” he then seems unclear about whether to locate those powers in the author or in the quality of his sources. The author of the 1797 Monthly Review article has similarly mixed feelings about the degree to which Lewis’s talents may be credited for the success of the novel. After detailing the novel’s plot and its precedents, he writes: “This may be called plagiarism; yet it deserves some praise . . . All invention is but new combination.” In praising Lewis, this reviewer returns to a more Augustan model of authorship, in which “new combination” is not “plagiarism”, but a legitimate writing strategy. By concerning themselves with the question of how Lewis’s use of sources reflects on his originality, and by allowing him only “some praise” for improving his sources, these critics move toward a Romantic definition of authorship that connects genius with originality. By finding Lewis lacking, they implicitly associate him with the figure of the hack writer who merely copies other novelists in order to manufacture “new” volumes to satisfy the voracious appetites of circulating library patrons. (6)
Of course, Lewis’s exaggerated avowal of his conscious and unconscious “plagiarisms” also suggests that he was intentionally courting such critical attention, especially since his indebtedness to these sources is tenuous and vague at best. By claiming a multiplicity of non-English sources (German, Danish, Spanish) Lewis highlights his translating abilities while implying his worldliness and genius in pulling together such a variety of source materials. As if to quash any doubts about his literary authority in spite of his anonymity, Lewis provides broad hints throughout the text that he is well-educated, worldly, and by implication, male. Not only does he claim authority for his sources (and so for his entire novel) as translations of traditional legends and ballads, but he opens his text with not one but two references to Horace. His opening epigraph and prefatory poem are both translated from Horace’s Epistles . Indeed, this prefatory poem can be read as encouraging speculation about his personal identity and literary authority. The poem opens by addressing his novel as it is launched in the literary marketplace, and goes on to provide tantalizing hints about the author’s identity. In it, he imagines that, if the book is successful, readers will “ask [the novel] by natural transition/ Respecting me and my condition” (ll. 31-2). What follows is an equivocal sketch of his social class (“nor very poor, nor very rich”), his physical appearance (“of graceless form and dwarfish stature”), and his character (“More passionate no creature living/ Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving”), concluded with one fact: his age (“I scarce have seen my twentieth year”) (ll. 34, 36, 47-8, 54). Here, Lewis apparently encourages readers to scrutinize the novel for hints about the identity of its author, and seems to answer those questions beforehand. In fact, this sketch contains virtually no solid features by which its author could be identified, at the same time that it subtly paints Lewis as a passionate young literary prodigy. Interestingly, Lewis employs another authorizing strategy in his chapter epigraphs, which contain references to Shakespeare, Tasso, Pope and several of the male “Graveyard Poets,” but no references to other Gothic novelists or any women writers. (7) In this way, from behind the anonymity of his first novel, Lewis attempted to establish his literary credentials unequivocally by distancing himself from potential associations with effeminate hack writing. In doing so, he reveals his concern to establish a solid authorial reputation and his sense that the greatest threat to that reputation would come from critics who saw The Monk as merely another anonymous example of circulating library lumber.
